ROGER HEDGECOCK: BULLET-TRAIN MADNESS

It’s an article of faith in the collectivist/environmentalist world that privately owned personal mobility vehicles (aka cars) and the freeways they drive on produce pollution, waste energy, generate urban sprawl and are ruining the planet.

The utopian answer is to force people into government-owned, union-built and operated 19th-century technology (aka trains) to save the planet.

The freedom and convenience of the car is winning the battle.

In an example of a national reality, after decades of investing more than half of all transportation funds in buses, trains, and trolleys, San Diego commuters still drive 96 percent of all miles traveled in their cars, just 4 percent in public transportation.

Notwithstanding this reality, utopia rules the politics of California, which is the only state to accept Obama stimulus money to build a 500-mile “bullet” train between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The train, its proponents say, will reduce vehicle emissions and global warming.

While no scientific study supports this claim, the irony is that this train cuts a straight line through a complex variety of environments and habitats with adverse effects on the planet that is being “saved.”

Environmental studies document that California’s “bullet” train would chew up precious Central Valley farmland, disrupt natural drainage patterns, divide and disrupt the habitat of endangered species and worsen air quality.

The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District regulates air quality in the Central Valley, which would be crossed by this train.

This district is already paying a $29 million yearly fine for violating the federal Clean Air Act, a fine that is paid by motorists in higher annual vehicle fees.

The district is concerned that the construction and operation of the train would make the air pollution problem worse.

In an area where one in seven K-12 students has been diagnosed with asthma, this is no small concern.

The train would also need a reliable source of massive amounts of electricity that is not currently available. Generating that electricity also carries an environmental cost.

Federal biologists have already documented that 11 endangered species, including the California kit fox, would be adversely affected.

The final environmental report on the train project is months behind schedule.

Both the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council have denounced Gov. Jerry Brown’s scheme to exempt the $68.4 billion train project from judicial review of these environmental studies.

Acting like any developer eager to get started and dismissive of any adverse environmental effects of his project, Brown says the exemption is necessary to get construction under way in the Central Valley on the initial 130-mile, $6.1 billion phase to meet a deadline for federal funds.

The June 5 Sierra Club letter to Brown stated in part:

“This (exemption) proposal sets a dangerous precedent, that, if applied here and to other large scale public works projects, will throw the state back to an era when bulldozers and engineers trumped clean air, clean water, wetlands and natural habitat, and the public interest with abandon.”

Merced County and the Farm Bureaus in Merced and Madera counties have already filed lawsuits based on these adverse environmental effects.